Chapter 25: Epilogue—Orlando

Orlando breathed in and out, slowly, deliberately, and with waning success to calm himself. He lay in bed, practicing the prayers his parents taught him when he was a child. He wasn’t particularly religious anymore, at least, he didn’t think he was. Nevertheless, he recited the prayers for the first time since the beginning of high school.

He was still sure of his agnosticism, he thinks, but that’s recently been shaken to it’s core.

Orlando was used to doubt. Used to not knowing and asking questions whose only reply was a shrug and some noncommittal advice to pray. Doubting in something he couldn’t ever personally see or feel like his peers was one thing, doubting the viability of science to understand the world itself was another. If he was wrong about magic not existing, what else could he be wrong about?

Orlando had been laying face down on his bed for a while now, and he started to realize he was having trouble breathing from the pillow, not from the rising panic in his chest. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling, letting gravity move some ennui from his shoulders to his stomach. The popcorn ceiling staring back down at the elder teen with its many eyes.

Did last week even happen?

He thinks it must have. It was the second week of school, and he still wasn’t ready for the bus. Turning towards the clock by his nightstand, he realizes he’s already missed first period. Briefly, Orlando wondered why no one had called him when he noticed he neglected to charge his phone. Still; he made no move to fix it, opting instead to stare at the device like it’d be able to fix its situation as long as it was given a stern enough glare.

It’s a strange thing, losing one's religion, Orlando thought, but even stranger to find it again in the form of your best friend.

Tyler weighed heavy on his mind, though he tried not to think too much about the impossibility of his closest friend becoming what his parents would effectively call a false god.

False gods? Jeez, I really am turning into my parents.

Still, whatever words could describe Tyler’s and Eris’ situation were lost to him, and he only had the vocabulary of the Sunday school teachings to fall back on. He felt the familiar pang of frustration he had all those years ago when he started to ask the kinds of questions that managed to get the junior pastor to request he never came back, thus freeing up his Sundays.

Only this time, he couldn’t exactly run away, though he desperately wanted to.

Tyler was his friend, and she had been through enough. Though he was ultimately a useless presence when they rescued Tyler with Mr. Johnson and Tyler’s mom, Christine, Orlando couldn’t help but feel like he was being a burden. A growing sense of frustration at not being able to help at all, and a liability to the adults who did the actual work, he felt more useless than ever.

For a while, he fell into a restless second sleep, wishing for the morning to give way to evening, hoping that the later hour would be able to console him and knowing that it won’t, accepting the sleep anyway.

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Then there was Tyler herself.

Tyler.

Orlando was so sure of his sexuality. It was the crystallizing force behind his apostasy, and he couldn’t even keep that. If Tyler was a girl this whole time, what did that make him?

His head ached with decisions he wanted to avoid making.

◊◊◊

Dinner that night was a quiet affair. Both of Orlando’s parents ate silently, slowly, and carefully; his father was reading some local newspaper, the front cover of which was talking about the local college football team winning some cup or other, and his mother was deep into one of her novels on the new tablet she got for her birthday. Orlando had taken up his seat at the other end of the table, next to little Esther, as he helped her cut the broiled chicken breast on her plate. The chicken was overcooked, as his mother was wont to do whenever she cooked meat, either out of fear of some kind of illness or fear of the meat itself.

The dining room had an oppressive silence about it. Punctuated, not soothed by the sounds of the knife scraping across Esther’s plate as she told him of the lovely tea party she had with her stuffed animals the other day. The heavy atmosphere seemed to worsen as the decision Orlando made was attempting to force itself to the forefront as he mindlessly added ooh's and aah's in the right places for Esther’s one-sided conversation.

“I want to switch schools.” Orlando finally said, and the heavy atmosphere was immediately lifted, replaced with shame, a desire to hide, and his mom’s dazzling eyes.

“Does this mean you’ll go to the school we wanted you to go to in the first place?” his mother asked, her eyes basically twinkling with stars. His dad didn’t respond or even look up from the paper.

“Sure, mom, I’ll go to bible school.” He’s not sure what will await him, or what his future would hold. He just needed to run. To feel some wind on his face to show him this was still real. Maybe bad decisions will give him that.

Orlando’s mom wasted no time in bounding up from her chair, breaking her only dinner rule of not leaving the table until everyone was finished. She practically bounded towards the corded phone they still kept on the wall and actually managed to keep working after all the years when such things were so many ways obsolete. He could hear the buttons being pressed and decided then he needed to leave this room as well.
Orlando bid Esther a good night and excused himself from the table.

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